Doug Stephen is Politely Peeved

Maybe a bit of a shallow description, but still, mostly truthful and worth sharing. I can’t tell you how many times I have to explain to frustrated sophomores that Computer Science is NOT Software Engineering.

I am one of few Computer Scientists in my lab. Most of our software developers are Engineers; and not even Software Engineers but Mechanical Engineers. That said, they are all fantastic computer programmers, and easily fit in to some sort of weird niche between Computer Scientist and Engineer based on this article’s “spectrum”.

The truth is that, as I’ve said before, programming is simply a tool. I know tons of wonderful Computer Scientists who are awful programmers, and tons of wonderful programmers that couldn’t give you a helpful “Big-O” complexity analysis of their software if you put a gun to their heads.

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